Hans Christian Oersted

Hans Christian Ørsted (August 14, 1777  March 9, 1851) was a Danish physicist and chemist, influenced by the thinking of Immanuel Kant. In 1820 he discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism in a very simple experiment. He demonstrated that a wire carrying a current was able to deflect a magnetized compass needle. Ørsted did not suggest any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon, nor did he try to represent the phenomenon in a mathematical framework.

Ørsted was not the first person to discover that electricity and magnetism are related. He was preceded in this discovery by 18 years by Gian Domenico Romagnosi, an Italian legal scholar. An account of Romagnosi's discovery was published in 1802 in an Italian newspaper, but it was overlooked by the scientific community.